It’s just typical – the morning we are due to leave the New Valley to drive back to Luxor, the weather has really brightened up, the sun already hot by 9.00am. We were planning to see a few more sites on the way out of Kharga, which would make the day ahead a lot more interesting. We still had the company of Basim, our constant police companion and there were mutterings about him asking for a lift back to Luxor with us, but we also had a police truck to escort us today too.

Our first stop was at Qasr el-Ghueita, one of the Kharga chain of hilltop fortresses which may once have housed a garrison of Roman troops, but which also contains a temple dated to Persian Dynasty XXVII and XXVIII, during the reigns of Amasis and Darius. The Arabic name of the mudbrick Roman fortress means ‘fortress of the small garden’, evidence that it was once part of a thriving agricultural community. It is perched on a high hill and a long sandy path leads up the slope to the temple entrance. Though dated to the Persian rulers the temple itself may have existed here from as early as the Middle Kingdom and it is thought that pictures of grape harvests in many Theban tombs may have described the gardens. Oasis wine was also a favourite during the New Kingdom. Within the high walls of the fortress, the sandstone temple occupied about one fifth of the space and was dedicated to the Theban triad of Amun, Mut and Khons. Much of the remaining decoration is Ptolemaic, with well-preserved screen walls and several floral columns.

Gheuita is probably the most well-decorated temple I’ve seen in the New Valley and the reliefs are superbly intricate. In typical Ptolemaic style, there are three sanctuaries in the back of the temple which still contain many remnants of coloured paint. We climbed up an adjacent staircase to the roof, from where we had a lovely view into the temple as well as across the surrounding countryside. The sandstone temple is surrounded by remains of the mudbrick structures of the fortress which are also scattered down the slopes of the hill. The temple is currently under the auspices of Yale University’s Theban Desert Roads Project.

Further west we stopped at another fortress and temple, the ruins of Qasr el-Zayyan, one of the largest and most important ancient settlements in Kharga Oasis. This time situated on a flat plain, Qasr el-Zayyan was also a Ptolemaic and Roman monument which was famous for its large well, an important source of water that gave the town the name of Takhoneourit, or Tchonemyris in Greek. The deep well can still be seen inside the massive enclosure wall of the temple.

The small sandstone temple within the fortress was dedicated to the god ‘Amun of Hibis’, who was known to the Romans as Amenibis and who we had met in other sites in the Oasis. The entrance gate in the southern side of the wall and has a lintel with a dedicatory inscription in Greek: ‘To Amenibis the great god of Tchonemyris and to the other gods of the temple, for the eternal preservation of Antoninus Caesar, our Lord and his whole house . . .’ and goes on to name the governor and officials involved in the restoration. The inscription is dated 11 August AD140. Though the temple is not so prolifically decorated as Qasr el-Ghueita, or as well preserved, it is a nice little monument. There are also a great many mudbrick structures in the surrounding area within the fortress walls.

Time was moving on and we also had to get a move on if we were to get to Luxor today. But first we were hoping to stop for coffee. I was beginning to despair as we drove further and further out of Kharga Oasis, until we eventually pulled up at a roadside coffee shop right on the edge of the Oasis. We stayed here for around an hour and had several cups of delicious coffee while Abdul and Basim drank tea and played dominoes with some of the locals. When we were asked if we needed a toilet before the next long leg of the drive, Sam and I accepted, thinking they must have one around the back of the café. We followed a man down a village street wondering where he was taking us and eventually were shown into the courtyard of a house where the owner had recently installed a new European-style toilet. A galabeya-clad lady proudly showed us the bright pink facilities and left us to it. The necessities of life have always been a problem while travelling around out-of-the-way places in Egypt. It’s a little embarrassing the way tourists are specially treated but Egyptian hospitality will prevail. Personally I’d rather go behind a rock in the desert, so as not to cause any trouble to people, but they are all so kind and eager to please. It’s also a source of baksheesh of course.

When we arrived at the little village of Bagdad and the last police checkpoint of the New Valley, Basim finally left us to travel back to Kharga City with the police truck. A fair bit of baksheesh had been handed over for his ‘services’, which has become an expensive part of tourist police protection on this trip – whether we wanted it or not, we were not given the choice. Waving the police goodbye we turned onto the Luxor road for the long four hour drive over the plateau. We passed the railway line that goes from Kharga all the way to Toshka, far out in the southern Sahara, now all sanded up and I wondered who cleans up the tracks when a train is coming.

Today there were many road works and long stretches of resurfacing work that was difficult to drive over and by the time we reached Luxor the sun had set and darkness had arrived.

Abdul drove over the bridge and dropped us at our apartment in Ramla. Fiona, Malcolm and I decided to go down the road to the Mersala hotel for dinner and who should we meet there but my old travelling companion Robin, now a Luxor resident. It was lovely to see her and we stayed and chatted for a while before walking home and collapsing into bed.

The modern town of Mut is the main centre of population in Dakhla and was built up around an earlier Medieval town, also called Mut. Then there is Mut el-Kharab (Mut the Ruined) earlier still. Leaving our hotel this morning – the Mut 3 – we went off to explore, yes, Mut!

Named after the Goddess Mut, Mut el-Kharab was the original settlement in the centre of Dakhla Oasis, said to date back to Dynasty XVIII, though its high mudbrick enclosing walls and the remains visible today are Roman. We pulled up by an entrance and began to climb a sandy slope towards the high point of the site. There seemed to be nobody about as we stopped to examine an interesting circular mudbrick structure with a deep cavity below, but within a minute we were spotted and shouted at by a guard. Apparently the site is closed and a team from the Dakhla Oasis Project were working. We got no further and were not even allowed to take a photograph of the site. I had wanted to see the remains of a temple of Seth which has been found here, but walking around the outside of the site there was a high wall or bushes with little opportunity to even take a peak. You win some, you lose some.

The Medieval town of Mut was accessible however and Fiona, Malcolm and I walked a little way into the warren of narrow crumbling shaded streets with Basim, our minder. Few people actually live there today and the old town has a very neglected feel, with buildings in various states of decay, but I could imagine how beautiful it must have been in its prime.

Mut the modern town is quite charming with wide streets and well-kept buildings and has a feeling of quiet rural prosperity. It’s quite a contrast to Kharga City which, though busy and bustling, looks quite run-down in some parts. I think the goddess herself would be pleased with her town today. By mid-morning we were near the medieval town outside a coffee-shop for the first strong Egyptian coffee of the day, surrounded by cats and enjoying the sunshine – something we hadn’t seen much of until today.

We took the loop road to Qasr Dakhla, our next stop on today’s itinerary and for me one of the high-points of the Oasis. We passed by the ancient sites of Galamun and Amheida, both of which are under excavation, past fields, cemeteries and Sheikh’s tombs, then around to the north-western edge of the depression. Nestled under the ever-present apricot-pink escarpment, el-Qasr is said to be the longest continuously inhabited town in the oasis.

No tickets were necessary for the guided tour of the medieval fortified town of Qasr Dakhla. We began at the mosque of Sheikh Nasr el-Din, which is a 19th century restoration of an older building that was destroyed, leaving only the original and very distinctive Ayyubid minaret. Leaving the mosque we wound our way through the narrow streets and alleyways, dark and mysterious, where the tall narrow three-storied mudbrick houses almost touched above our heads. Some of the wooden doors were below the current ground level and elaborate wooden windows high on the upper stories of houses were almost falling out in places. Most of the buildings were numbered and had the owner’s name painted or carved on a sign. Intricately carved lintels illustrated quotations from the Quran and we even saw a few pharaonic blocks that had been built into walls. The old town, though fairly neglected, is still populated by around 700 people but we only caught a fleeting glance of any inhabitants – here and there, a colourfully-dressed lady throwing out a pan of water to settle the dust or a couple of girls balancing baskets on their heads disappear around a corner.

The guide showed us the olive press, made from the wood of an old olive tree and a mill for grinding grain that would once have been turned by an ox, then a blacksmith’s shop complete with forge and bellows from which strange giant iron nails were produced for sale – all preserved for tourists of course. We saw the madrasa, a school where boys went to learn Quranic scriptures and which was the largest building in the town. The whole place is seeped in history and the atmosphere is one of a bygone time. Most of all it is very photogenic and I must have taken hundreds of pictures on our tour. We ended up by the Ethnographic Museum where traditional crafts and costumes are displayed and sold and photographs on the wall tell of the history of el-Qasr. Ladies outside sat on the ground surrounded by their colourful woven palm-leaf baskets for sale. But it was time to move on. Sam and Abdul had stayed in a coffee shop outside the town and we went to meet up with them and have another coffee. From the roof there was a fabulous view of el-Qasr.

Further to the north-west Dakhla’s only mountain, Mount Edmonstone, named after the first western traveller to Dakhla (by whom, I wondered), rose high above the desert, marked by its distinctive flat top. We drove towards the mountain and turned off down a track past remains of several Roman farmsteads to the Temple of Deir el-Hagar, literally ‘the Stone Monastery’. It was Sir Archibald Edmondstone who first began to clear the sand-filled interior of the temple in 1819. When he and other early explorers first encountered this Roman temple it must have been a romantic sight, in reasonable condition but with an air of decay. Today it has been thoroughly restored by the Dakhla Oasis Project and the story and photographs illustrating the temple’s restoration can be seen in a small visitor centre at the site. There are many interesting elements at Deir el-Hagar including a single intact papyrus column at the entrance to the sanctuary which bears the names in carved graffiti of nineteenth century explorers of the Rohlfs expedition. A huge ceiling block with an astronomical motif has been pieced together and displayed upright for easier viewing on the south side of the temple – a unique scene for a sanctuary ceiling apparently. The original temple was built by the Emperor Nero, added to by Vespasian, Titus and finally Domitian in the first century AD.

This was an area of agricultural importance and the temple would have served the Roman soldiers and the farmers who lived in the area. A stone gate was the main entrance through a large mudbrick enclosure wall and a processional way was defined by 20 mudbrick columns leading to the temple. Inside there are six chambers, including a staircase to the roof. It gives the impression of a miniature version of the Ptloemaic temples seen in the Nile Valley and is similar in style to other Roman temples we had seen in Kharga. This was the only place in Dakhla we saw other tourists as a coach of around a dozen people was just leaving as we arrived.

El-Muzzawaka means ‘the Painted Rock’ and here, not far from Deir el-Hagar, are hundreds of robbed tombs that honeycomb the flat-topped gebel. The most famous are the colourful painted tombs of Padiosiris and Petubastis which combine typical Egyptian funerary art with un-Egyptian classical figures. These tombs were closed last time I was here in 2003 and though we were told the restoration has been completed, we were still not allowed inside. Instead, after we had bought tickets, the gafir took us on a walk-about of the hill urgently insisting we look at the mummies. I remembered from my last visit, the various undecorated tombs with quite a number of mummified corpses lying about haphazardly so I was just as insistent about not seeing them. I did have a look at some kind of extensive water feature and there was a great view of yardangs scattered about on the slope below. A big new visitor centre has been built here since my last visit but this too was not yet open.

When we got back to the hotel late in the afternoon we found the hot spring was now running. Unfortunately I had forgotten to bring my swimsuit, but Malcolm and Fiona were soon having a dip in the warm muddy water while I sat on the edge and dangled my legs in, watching them slowly turn brown from the minerals. It’s been a long but very enjoyable day.

It was mid-morning before Sam and I were awake but we didn’t see Fiona or Malcolm until lunchtime, which actually became a late breakfast for us all. We decided on an easy afternoon and asked Abdul to drive us in his minibus to Deir el-Shelwit.

This little Roman Temple of Isis is on the edge of the cultivation beyond Medinet Habu. As usual the temple itself was locked up and no key was available (or ever has been the few times I’ve visited), but we wandered around the temple grounds for a while taking pictures. The most interesting monument here are the two tall walls of a propylon gate, which are covered in good quality reliefs depicting Roman Emperors, Vespasian, Otho, Galba and Domitian before various deities. To the north-west of the temple is a tiny sacred lake, or more probably a well, which looks like it has been cleared since I was last here. The square-shaped temple is undecorated on its exterior walls, except for a few blocks which obviously don’t belong, as some of them are upside down. We could peer through the grid of the gate into the temple to see the blackened walls with unfinished cartouches in the sanctuary. The few Romans mentioned inside the temple include Hadrian and Antonius Pius.

One of the most surprising things we found here is a new gigantic modern wall, about 3 or four metres high, that has been built around the site. A team of painters were engaged in painting it – I wondered how long that would take. Presumably the wall is to protect the monument, but it is a bit of an eyesore. We were soon to discover that the wall continued several kilometres all the way to Medinet Habu.

We stopped a couple of times on the track leading back to Medinet Habu to see if we could identify an area known as Kom el-Samak, part of the vast city complex of Amenhotep III which was excavated by the Japanese in the 1970s. Of course this would be now all covered over and from the road, one sandy mound looks very much like another.

Back at Medinet Habu we sent Abdul off to see if he could find the gafir for the little hidden temple of Qasr el-Aguz – I say hidden because it is almost impossible to find amongst the houses of the village of Kom Lolla. I’ve only been here once before and have wanted to see it again for years, but it has always been locked up. Fortunately the temple is currently being cleaned and the gafir was found and was able to open it up for us.

This is a rare temple of Thoth, miniscule in size, from the time of Ptolemy VIII Euergetes II. Parts of the outer wall are still complete and a gate leads into a wide courtyard. There are some beautiful and impressive cornices and lintels with winged serpent motifs on the doorways into three further chambers. These rooms are lit by small apertures high on the walls, throwing the remaining hieroglyphs into relief. Some of the reliefs are unfinished revealing red-painted outlines.

On my last visit many years ago the walls inside the temple were blackened and neglected and almost unreadable. What a surprise to see brightly painted deities now looking down from the walls.

When the visit was over we had a coffee at Ahmed’s Hapy Habu cafe (a new one to me), before driving along the monument road at dusk as the new lights on the Theban mountain began to glow. I’m not sure how I feel about the new lights which span the whole length of the monument area and floodlight tomb entrances and the surrounding hills. Perhaps a bit touristy? I’ll reserve judgement for now.

We all had dinner later at Tutankhamun Restaurant on the West Bank. I haven’t been here for years but it is just as I remember it – more food than we could possibly eat and a magnificent view from the roof across the river to Luxor.

Abdul picked us up in his taxi this morning. I hadn’t seen his old Peugeot taxi for several years, but had happy memories of many long trips made in it. Taxis in Luxor now are mostly new smart-looking saloon cars, models like Hyundai and Mitsubishi, but still with the same blue and white livery. Abdul’s taxi looked sad and care-worn and he told us he was going to sell it.

We drove out of Luxor on the Airport Road with thick dusty clouds hanging over the mountains, transforming them into pale ghosts marching along the edge of the cultivated land. Before long the sun came through and picked out the vivid colours of bougainvillea and other pretty flowering shrubs that lined the road. The road-sweepers were out with their rush-headed brooms and push-carts, oblivious to the stream of traffic speeding past. Donkey-carts and bicycles of course have their own road rules, often clinging to the wrong side of the road and facing towards the speeding busses, lorries and cars which swerve violently across the lane to avoid them. At Alamary checkpoint we turned left towards Qena, through Yasa checkpoint and alongside a canal, (named the Shenhuria Canal) where children from rural reed-roofed mudbrick houses played on the banks.

At around 20km north of Luxor, with the town of Qus about 5km further on, we turned left over a bridge into the village of Shenhur. Now I could see why Abdul wanted to drive us here and not let Sam and I come on our own. Shenhur was once an important village but now looked very poor indeed. The main narrow dirt track wound between tall houses towards the mosque and twice we had to stop and ask directions at junctions, even though Abdul and Sam had both been here before, but eventually we arrived at the little Roman Temple we had come to see. The village of Shenhur itself takes its name from the hieroglyphs on the temple walls, read as pa-shn-hr which translated means the ‘ Lake of Horus’, a mysterious name as there is no evidence of a lake or water feature here.

When we got out of the car we were told that Shenhur was closed to visitors and we would need special permission to see the temple – words we were getting used to hearing on this trip. However, Abdul had met the gafir before and after the usual handshakes and exchange of mobile phone numbers (and promise of baksheesh), permission was quickly granted. I was glad he had insisted on bringing us. By the time we entered the temple precinct – a large walled patch of bare earth where a herd of goats were grazing, we were surrounded by seemingly all the children of the village shouting their heads off. Fortunately they were eventually shooed away and told to stay outside the wall. Sam and I went off into the tiny temple. A few early travellers visited Shenhur, but it never drew a great deal of serious interest until a Belgian-French archaeological mission began a decade of excavations there in 1992 under the direction of Jan Quaegebeur and Claude Traunecker and later Harco Wilems. The temple has suffered a great deal of damage over the centuries by both stone-robbing and more latterly, lime-burning. The walls of the structure were built from limestone and the best of this was taken, leaving the poorer quality stone with few badly preserved reliefs. The earliest (northern) part was built by the Emperor Augustus and this contains a central sanctuary, vestibule and door jambs that were decorated by Augustus. One of the most interesting areas is part of an astronomical ceiling in the wabet, which the excavators had re-erected. Other parts of the temple were decorated by later Roman rulers while the outer wall, which still has well-preserved reliefs, were decorated by the Emperor Claudius.

Romans following Augustus added other parts to the temple, a mammisi, a hypostyle hall and a chapel of Horudja, who at Shenhur is associated with the god Tutu, a deity I first came across in the Western Desert and have been interested in ever since. Tutu, here named as a son of the goddess Neith, is in evidence in several monuments around the Coptos area and associated with several different gods. At Shenhur Tutu is named as ‘The Powerful and Victorious God’, and the Personal Saviour ‘…who comes to one calling him’ and he is depicted surrounded by various goddesses. Min is also very much in evidence at Shenhur, as in other parts of the Coptos region. A variety of rituals are depicted on the walls, some of them unidentified and reliefs include a whole range of Theban deities. I read in a report by Jan Quaegebeur that two secret rooms were found in the temple, each with a rolling heavy stone door on wheels, giving access to the crypts – stuff of Indiana Jones!

But it was time to move on. Our next port of call was the village of Tod, around 20km south of Luxor, where the falcon-headed god Montu was worshipped since the Middle Kingdom. Abdul had insisted that we could now buy tickets at the temple, but he ended up having to drive all the way back to Luxor to get them, while we stayed to look around. It’s a good idea to remember that tickets for Tod must be bought at Luxor Temple before setting out.

Most of the monuments which can be seen at Tod today date from New Kingdom to Roman times. On the north side of the site is a small barque shrine or way-station built by Tuthmose III and restored by later Ramesside kings. On the west are remains of a quay and avenue of sphinxes. There is also evidence of a small sacred lake to the north and east. The largest remains of the temple consist of a columned hall begun by Ptolemy VIII, which includes a hidden side room which was a treasury above a chapel on the south side. The later temple was built against a wall of the Middle Kingdom remains, and a long text of Senwosret I has been over-carved with Ptolemaic reliefs. Many of the later cartouches have been left blank, which we often see in Ptolemaic building works, because the rulers changed so rapidly. Having visited Tod several times before, Sam and had a quick look around. The site has been tidied up since I was last there and the temple walls have been cleaned. The block-field has been extended to include many interesting Middle Kingdom blocks as well as a small area of later Coptic reliefs and architectural bits and pieces. It was mid-day and very hot and as Sam and I sat for a while in the shade the guards offered to share their lunch with us, which we politely refused, so they made tea for us instead.

While back in Luxor, Abdul had also bought us tickets for the tomb of Ankhtifi at el-Moalla, about 12km further south, a site that we thought was closed. There are surprises every day in Egypt and some of them are good ones. Sam and I had visited Ankhtifi’s tomb once before and at that time we had only seen the wonderful painted scenes by torchlight after dark. For a long time I have wanted to go back there. Although much damaged, the paintings in this tomb are like nothing else in the Theban region, because it dates to the hazy First Intermediate Period.

Ankhtifi was a nomarch, a provincial governor, who held many titles during the troubled times of the First Intermediate Period. His tomb at el-Moalla is famous for his autobiographical text telling of famine in Egypt and how he helped people from other regions. Like all autobiographies, Ankhtifi’s tale could be a just a little glorified. He states that he saved his people from ‘. . . dying on the sandbank of Apothis’. The text mentions the towns of Hefat and Hor-mer, whose location is not now known. Ankhtifi tells of feeding and clothing the people in adjoining districts, and states ‘. . . I was like a sheltering mountain . . . the whole country has become like locusts going in search of food, but never did I allow anybody in need to go from this nome to another one. I am the hero without equal.’ Famine seems to have haunted the Egyptians periodically and there are many reliefs in monuments over the whole country which show scenes of hunger and hardship. Archaeologists suggest that the turmoil and uncertainty surrounding the end of the Old Kingdom was largely due to a prolonged drought when the Nile inundations were low and the fields did not produce enough food. There are many scenes of obtaining and cooking food in Ankhtifi’s tomb, though most of them involve catching wild animals, birds or fish rather than the production of grains and fruit that we see in the New Kingdom tombs.

The architecture of Ankhtifi’s tomb chapel is also very unusual in that there doesn’t seem to be a flat surface anywhere. The walls follow the natural curves and bumps of the rock and the remaining pillars seem to be all irregular shapes and sizes, leaning in different directions, but somehow manage to look elegant. Where painted plaster remains in patches on the walls the colours are very vibrant and the decorative themes are unusual. One colour especially predominates and that is a pale green not usually seen in Theban tombs. On the western wall there are remains of a fishing scene showing a wide variety of very detailed fish.

After we had seen Ankhtifi’s tomb we walked along the terrace where several more tomb entrances could be seen, but in most of these the decoration has been lost. Finally, the guard opened the door to the last tomb, that of Sobekhotep, which was small with several rather deep open burial pits, so there was little room to move around. The decoration here could be seen on the walls but is very damaged. The hill of el-Moalla on which this cemetery is situated is pyramid-shaped and recent excavators have found pyramid elements in the burials, echoes of the Old Kingdom royal tombs. The necropolis stretches for about 5km and contains hundreds of tomb entrances.

As we drove back to Luxor in the late afternoon the sky was again black with dark dusty clouds gathering on either side of us, airbrushing out the surrounding landscape. Could be more bad weather on the way.

This morning we set off to explore the western end of Dakhla Oasis, the road bounded all along its northern edge by the distant line of pale hills that forms the escarpment. Beyond the cultivation and right at the edge of the desert we came to one of the best-preserved Roman monuments of the Oasis – the temple at Deir el-Hagar, whose name means ‘Monastery of Stone’.

This is another temple, like Hibis, that had been buried by sand for many centuries and has recently been restored, with quite a bit of reconstruction. The original building work dates to the reign of the Emperor Nero and was dedicated to the Theban Triad of Amun, Mut and Khons, though other emperors have also left their names on its walls. A lovely temple, with a long paved processional way leading from a large gateway in the thick mudbrick enclosure wall. Near the gate we saw remains of brightly painted plaster with decorations and inscriptions in Greek. Travellers have left graffiti here since very early times, even on the round rough columns in the hypostyle hall. The sanctuary once contained a magnificent and unique astronomical ceiling with the arching figure of the sky-goddess Nut and her consort, the earth-god Geb and this has now been set up outside the temple for easy viewing. Many deities are depicted in the sanctuary and I saw again the oasis gods, Amun-nakht and his consort Hathor and Thoth with his desert consort Nehmetaway. Outside the temple there was a small building that displayed plans and information on the temple restoration, including many photographs and in the distance on rising ground to the north-west of the temple I could see the Roman Period cemetery where, we were told, crude human-headed terracotta coffins have been uncovered.

Our next stop was the site of el-Muzzawaka, whose name means ‘The Decorated Hill’ because of the many painted Roman Period tombs found here. Once part of the settlement of Amheida on the edge of the Oasis, the tombs here were cut into the soft ridges of high ground. The two most interesting tombs, belonging to Petubastis and Petosiris which are said to be outstanding for their colourful frescos, were unfortunately locked up and we were not able to go inside because they are collapsing. The guards did offer to show us other tombs, which they assured us had many mummies and skeletons, but were undecorated. I’m not squeamish but I really don’t feel comfortable looking at disregarded human limbs and skulls sticking up out of the sand, so I declined their offer. One thing I did notice here was how small most of the tomb openings were, as though built for tiny people.

Back in the minibus we drove the short distance to Qasr Dakhla, the fortified medieval town of Dakhla that is still inhabited, unlike Mut, which is now crumbling and deserted. History was all around us as we began to walk through the narrow partly-covered alleys and dirt-tracks of the village. El-Qasr was occupied from the Roman period onwards, but what remains today is medieval Islamic architecture, a maze of elaborately carved wooden lintels over dark intriguing doorways and crumbling walls. At least two of the houses that have been restored were quite large and must have belonged to wealthy families. We went into one of the houses where an ancient crooked staircase led up to sleeping quarters with shuttered windows on an upper floor and tried to imagine what it would have been like to live there. Many of the carved door-lintels had verses from the Quran and the names of the occupying family but I noticed in a couple of places there were stone lintels with hieroglyphs, upside-down and obviously recycled from some nearby temple or tomb.

A local guide showed us around el-Qasr because we would have quickly lost ourselves among the narrow interlinking streets. We were shown an ancient olive press and given a demonstration of grinding grain. I have to say it really was a photographer’s paradise and given enough film I could have stayed all day. Coming out of the village we had a look at the mosque with its 12th century Ayyubid minaret, the only original part of the building still standing. The rest was destroyed to build the mausoleum of Sheikh Nasr el-Din. We ended our visit with a look around the Museum of Ethnology where many old photographs adorn the walls and examples of crafts and clothing are exhibited.

Our return journey to our hotel took us past the site of the settlement of Amheida, which an American team has been excavating. Here at the edge of the desert the wind was so strong that dust and sand filled the air and we didn’t even get out of the bus to look at the site from the edge of the road. On the loop road back to Mut we passed the hundreds of blue-domed tombs in the huge Muslim cemetery at Qalamun, several of the tall distinctive oasis pigeon houses and a few areas of mudbrick ruins that we couldn’t identify. It was a lovely day.

Back at the hotel, Elizabeth, Val, Judy and I went for a bob-around the hotspring, which must be about a metre and a half deep as the water reaches up to my chin when I stand on tiptoe. We ate again at our ‘usual’ restaurant and had coffee in the same place as last night. We’re creatures of habit if we find a good place to eat.

We all form pictures in our mind of the places we will visit and even though I’ve seen photographs of the fortress of Dush, it seemed very different to how I’d imagined it. For a start the drive from Kharga was much further than I’d thought – at the very southern edge of the oasis, Dush is an outpost at about 100km from the city and we drove past several crescent-shaped Barkan sand-dunes and yardangs, or mud-lions, on the way. As we turned off the main Kharga road onto a sand-covered tarmac track we finally found the Roman fortress rising from the high ground ahead of us, while a group of little white tents belonging to the French IFAO excavation team were clustered below on the plain.

It was quite a climb up the slope of soft sand to get to the temple, which was built from stone and was bigger and better preserved than I had imagined. This area in ancient times was known as Kysis and comprised several villages surrounded by cultivation with quite a sophisticated irrigation system of underground pipes, which has been investigated by recent excavators. The sandstone temple, dedicated to Osiris and Isis, butts onto the side of the fortress, within its outer walls and was probably built by the Emperor Domitian, with further additions and decoration by Trajan and Hadrian. There is a dedicatory inscription of Trajan on the large stone entrance gate and this is dated to 116 AD. Inside there is a courtyard with remains of columns, a pillared hall and further chambers leading to the sanctuary. Some of the walls in the inner temple have lovely reliefs depicting Roman emperors and deities. The walls were reputedly once partially sheathed in gold leaf, which must have looked amazing. We went up a staircase onto the roof from where there are wonderful views across the once-cultivated area which the desert has now reclaimed. In 1989 a hoard of treasure was discovered in one of the store-rooms in the temple. Known as the ‘Dush Treasure’, now in Cairo Museum, a collection of superb religious artefacts was buried for safety probably during the 5th to 6th centuries AD. I made a mental note to look for it in Cairo.

From the stone temple we could see mudbrick ruins of a second temple across the sloping hillside. When we walked over the pottery-covered sand to the site we could stand inside the tall walls and look up at the barrel-shaped vaulted roof, but there was no plaster or decoration remaining here and little to give us any information. This structure is also probably Roman but little else is known about it. We spent quite a long time in the mudbrick temple, an eerily romantic setting, before moving on to our next destination.

Back towards Kharga City, a little way off the main road, we came to the ‘fortress of the small garden’, Qasr el-Ghueita. This is another imposing Roman fortress, perhaps once a garrison headquarters, that commands wonderful views from the top of a hill over the surrounding desert. The settlement which dates back to at least the Middle Kingdom was called in ancient times Per-ousekh and was renowned for its grape cultivation and wine and is mentioned in many Theban tombs. Within the Roman fortress walls is a large yellow sandstone temple probably dating from the Persian Period or perhaps even earlier and dedicated to the Theban Triad. We walked between the screen walls of a Ptolemaic pronaos into a courtyard. I liked this temple even more than Dush and its richly decorated hypostyle hall with beautiful floral columns was a joy. Most of the decoration here appeared to be Ptolemaic with the usual scenes of Nile Gods and nome symbols lining the lower registers and I saw several cartouches as well as unusual-looking deities. There were three small sanctuaries here which would have once held the cult statues of Amun, Mut and Khons but the decoration was blackened with age. From the roof we could see another structure with screen walls and columns, perhaps a mammisi or birth-house.

Our next stop was Qasr el-Zayyan, just a little further towards Kharga and close to the main road. One of the largest and most important settlements in the oasis Qasr Zayyan is another link in the chain of Roman fortresses that guarded the trade routes. The Greeks called the settlement Tchonemyris, which means ‘The Great Well’ and the well itself can still be seen within the massive well-preserved mudbrick enclosure walls. This major source of water would have given the place a great deal of importance in ancient times and it would have probably functioned as an overnight stop for travellers. Inside the enclosure is a sandstone temple dedicated to one of the major oasis gods, ‘Amun of Hibis’ (the Roman Amenibis) and constructed during the Ptolemaic and Roman periods. A large stone gateway, partially covered by blown sand, fronts the temple and on the lintel above a dedicatory text has a Greek inscription dated to 140 AD: ‘To Amenibis the great god of Tchonemyris and to the other gods of the temple, for the eternal preservation of Antoninus Caesar, our Lord and his whole house . . .’ and goes on to name the governor and officials involved in the restoration. Inside the small temple there is a courtyard that leads to a sanctuary.

We wanted to get back to Kharga as early as possible today so that our drivers could break their Ramadan fast at the proper time. At 6.00pm all went out into town to a local restaurant where Abdul had pre-arranged a table for us straight after the Itfar meal for the locals had ended. This was a typical Egyptian restaurant with long tables and bench seats. The scrubbed wooden tables already contained stacks of local flat bread and metal jugs of water when we were seated and the only menu choice was beef or chicken. Fortunately this was accompanied by my usual Egyptian vegetarian diet of rice and vegetables, but it was very good. We have been accompanied today by an Indian lady called Mina, a solo traveller who we met in our hotel this morning. Unfortunately having an extra unscheduled person with us has caused problems for the drivers with both the tourist police and the minibus company so it looks like she won’t be going any further with us. After our meal a few of us sat in a coffee shop for a couple of hours. It’s great to chill out and talk about the day’s sites with like-minded people, but before Midnight we reluctantly walked back to the hotel, while Kevin told us about something quite unidentifiable but disgusting he found in the fridge in his room. I am thankful that this will be the last night sleeping here because I still haven’t identified those insects that were in my bed last night.

If we’d been staying in Faiyum City today’s trip would have been a lot easier, but opting to stay by the lake meant a long and bumpy drive across the desert to our first stop today at Medinet Madi. This site is said to be the one of the most difficult places to get to in the whole of Faiyum, but it is the site I most wanted to see – one of the most important sites too because it contains a Middle Kingdom Temple, which are rare in Egypt. We had a police escort with us in the taxi as well as several in a car up ahead, which was just as well because Abdul wasn’t too sure of the way and luckily they knew how to get to the site.

After leaving the south-western end of Birket Qarun and driving east along the desert road, we eventually reached a remote village called Abu Ghandir, where to my surprise we turned off straight across the sand. There was no track to follow but the police car ahead was making straight towards a sandy ridge in the distance and I’m sure as he was zigzagging about Abdul was praying that his taxi wouldn’t get stuck in the powdery sand. We stopped at some distance from the ridge, not able to go any further and we were told that we had to walk the rest of the way and climb up the mound. That was fun – one step forward and three backwards in the deep sand! At the top we found a little square hut and a gafir and looking down the other side of the ridge I could see the temple buildings and town site stretching out below me half-buried in the sand. Accompanied by the gafir we slid down the bank and walked to the entrance to the site where many stone sphinxes and lion statues were poking their heads out of the sand. Apparently they regularly appear and disappear as the desert blows over them. The light here was dazzlingly bright. The temple is constructed from pale golden limestone blocks which hurt the eyes to look at and played havoc with the exposure on my camera, but I thought it was very beautiful. There are teams of archaeologists who are currently excavating here but today nobody was about and it felt so remote and lonely and quite romantic.

The first temple we entered was the Middle Kingdom temple built by Amenemhet III and his son and co-regent Amenemhet IV of Dynasty XII. I was delighted to see reliefs in the three sanctuaries of this temple, which is dedicated to the crocodile god Sobek and Renenutet, the snake-headed goddess of fertility and the harvest. The reliefs were very worn but also very rare as Renenutet is seldom seen in temples. The goddess was known to have a strong cult here at Medinet Madi where her role as protector of crops would stem from the large-scale crop production in Faiyum. There were also cartouches of Amenemhet III and IV carved on the sanctuary walls. The temple was restored during Dynasty XIX and greatly expanded during the Graeco-Roman Period. Back to back with the Middle Kingdom temple is a Ptolemaic addition which contains an altar and some Greek inscriptions. It was on the wall in this part that we found a large relief of Sobek, in human form with a crocodile head and a wonderful toothy crocodile grin. The gafir told us that the Italian archaeologists recently uncovered a Ptolemaic gate to the east of the temple and on further investigation another temple dedicated to Sobek was discovered beneath the rubble. This second temple was built of mudbrick with stone doorways and lintels, with its axis at right-angles to the older temple. Tablets and papyri were also found in the debris, including an important oracular document written in demotic script. On the north side of the temple court, a crocodile nursery was discovered with dozens of eggs in different stages of maturation. Medinet Madi, whose modern name means ‘city of the past’, was known in Graeco-Roman times as ‘Narmouthis’. Excavators have discovered two separate towns at the site, though little of these was in evidence today and I imagined that the encroaching sand blown across the site on the desert winds had covered them all over again.

It was a long walk back to the cars on the other side of the ridge and then another long drive to Umm el-Baragat, the site of the Graeco-Roman town of Tebtunis. We travelled back towards Medinet el-Faiyum before following country tracks through many poor-looking villages to a village called Tutin from where we followed a canal until we got to the edge of the desert again. The cars pulled up by a little mosque and we had another long walk across the sand until we eventually reached the paved processional way to the temple. It’s funny how the police escort who are guarding us never bother to come along if there’s any walking involved. We were met by two guardians who showed us around the large town site.

Tebtunis, one of the largest Graeco-Roman towns in Faiyum, is thought to have originated in the New Kingdom but all the extant remains date to the Ptolemaic and Roman Periods. There has been a lot of restoration here, especially at the domestic site where several Roman villas have been reconstructed, their low walls, many of which still have some plaster and paint, have been consolidated and capped for protection. We entered the site along the processional way to the little Ptolemaic to Greek Period temple dedicated to Soknebtynis (‘Sobek, Lord of Tebtunis’) which was guarded by two yellow limestone lion statues. At the southern end of temple area, several large fine white limestone columns, of Greek style, have been reconstructed in a court on the western axis of the building. The domestic site was quite extensive and very interesting, with small dwellings and large villas clearly laid out and in one part we saw a stone-lined construction that we were told were Roman baths. Umm el-Baragat was home to a vast crocodile cemetery where over 1000 mummified crocodiles and sarcophagi were found by the earliest excavators, Grenfell and Hunt of the EES. In 1900 there was also one of those frequent ‘happy accident’ finds that Egypt is well-known for. A workman found one of the crocodile mummies (which had been considered worthless) to be wrapped in sheets of papyrus and together with many other fragments of papyrus found by excavators in the town’s houses, they became known collectively as the Tebtunis Papyri. The ‘Tebtunis Papyri’ consisted of a small library which contained numerous literary, medical and administrative documents as well as religious texts from the temple.

By the time we had walked around the whole site the sun was already going down and Sam, Jane and I were feeling pretty tired. No wonder the policemen had opted to stay by their car and drink tea! But it has been a really good day and to finish we stopped at Medinet el-Faiyum for a leisurely coffee on the way back to our hotel.

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